The peaceful warriors

For the first time in his 12-year project recording pristine corners of the world, Sebastião Salgado has photographed people - Xingu Indians in his home country, Brazil. Their life of fishing, bathing and wrestling entranced him

The peaceful warriors

For the first time in his 12-year project recording pristine corners of the world, Sebastião Salgado has photographed people - Xingu Indians in his home country, Brazil. Their life of fishing, bathing and wrestling entranced him

After two years fraternising with giant tortoises, whales and gorillas, Sebastião Salgado has turned his attention to human beings - the Alto Xingu Indians. As befits Genesis - a 12-year project in which Salgado is focusing on the world's few remaining pristine environments - these people live their life as naked as Adam and Eve. For Salgado, they are naked in every sense: they have no front, their emotions stripped of pretence, their behaviour of pretensions.

The photographer spent two months in the Upper Xingu Basin, where around 2,500 people live between the equatorial forest of the southern Amazon and the savanna of central Brazil. He lived alongside three tribes in five of the 13 villages - the Kuikuro (450 people), the Waura (320) and the Kamayura (350). Although they speak three different languages (Carib, Tupi and Arawak), they live, peaceably, within a day's walk of each other.

At the heart of their lives there is a paradox. The Alto Xingu Indians fight among themselves for leadership of the tribes, they fight intertribally for supremacy at annual ceremonies, yet they are pacifists. The fights are ritual, symbolic wrestling matches, engaged in by both men and women, and can last up to a month. Often they are declared a draw when both sides call it quits. The tribes are convinced their peaceable nature is rooted in their diet: they live on fish, and because they do not eat animals with hot blood, they say, their guts are never warmed by "aggression". Salgado, who is Brazilian, communicated with a few villagers in his native Portuguese, but mostly via an anthropologist-cum-translator who travelled with him.

The tribes were first discovered by explorers in the 1950s. They soon became known for the simplicity of their lives, their beauty and their hygiene fixation - they bathe four times a day in the streams. The greatest threat to traditional life comes from soya bean farming. Pesticides and insecticides have begun to pollute the waters of the Amazon and its tributaries, killing the fish. Deforestation and hydroelectric dams also cause concern.

Amazingly, the Indians have remained largely untouched by the industrialised world. "Oh boy, it really is paradise," Salgado says, light-headed with enthusiasm. "In two months we didn't see one quarrel between men and women, men and men, children and children. Not one. They say it is because they don't eat meat, but I think it is because they live in equilibrium with nature."

Occasionally, villagers have left for the cities, but they have found it hard to integrate. Those who have returned to the villages have found no use for their consumables: "They cannot have a car inside the village, or a telephone or a television." These days, children go to school where they are taught by Indians about their own culture. When girls have their first period, they retreat for a year into a dark tent where they are prepared for womanhood. When they emerge, their brown skin now palest white from sun deprivation, they are ready for marriage. Marriages are open; it is expected that both men and women will take extra partners. There is no formal religion, but the Indians worship nature.

Salgado was awed by the tribes' harmony with the natural world. "The kids play with dust and mud and water, they are completely inside nature." Because they are not frightened of a tree branch falling or a snake biting, it tends not to happen: "Nature for them is not dangerous, it is their home."

Time, still told from the sun, is a fluid concept for the Xingu Indians. A host village will not be put out if a visiting party from a neighbouring village arrives 10 days later than planned for the great shared festivals. Society is hierarchical. After two days, the villagers demanded of Salgado and his assistant which of them was the chief. Sons of chiefs are sent into seclusion for three or more years to prepare for life as a chief. But if they are not good fighters, whatever their qualities, they can't inherit the title.

The tribes accepted Salgado readily - "You bring a hammock, they give you a place to fix it and that's it" - but there were cultural differences: the locals thought the visitors smelled, partly because they washed only twice a day. They also thought the visitors ugly because they had so much body hair. Salgado remained clothed throughout his stay. He loved the lifestyle - slow, leisurely and non-accumulating. When they are hungry they fish. If they catch a lot, they eat a lot, and share. Salgado talks joyously about one picture of a young girl with a huge fish, and it's hard to know which he finds more beautiful - the girl or the fish. "Oh boy, there are so many fish. Good fish, always fresh. I was fishing, yes, yes, yes."

Last September Salgado left the Upper Xingu Basin. As he sat in the tiny plane sent to take him home, and he looked out of the window at those he was leaving behind, he wondered why he, and mankind in general, had chosen the modern way of life over this one. "I felt desolate," he says.